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EULOGY 



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GENERAL GRANT. 



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EULOGY 



General Grant 



DELIVERED AT 



WESTMINSTER ABBEY 
London, August 4TH, 1885 

BY 

CANON FARRAR 



NEW YORK 
E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

31 West Twenty-third St. 






By Transfer 
D. C. Public Library 
OCT 1 b 1834 



rO 

cr 



DISfRICT or iOLUMBIA P«€BBRT^ 
'^^m^^^mou m&LlQ LIBRARY 



ADDRESS. 



Eight years have not passed since 
the Dean of Westminster, whom 
Americans so much loved and hon- 
ored, was walking round this Abbey 
with General Grant, and explaining 
to him its wealth of great memorials. 
Neither of them had attained the al- 
lotted span of human life, and for 
both we might have hoped that 
many years would elapse before they 
went down to the grave, full of years 



6 FA REAR'S EULOGY 

and honors. But this is already the 
fourth summer since the Dean fell 
asleep, and to-day we are assembled 
at the obsequies of the great soldier 
whose sun has gone down while it yet 
was day, and at whose funeral service 
in America tens of thousands are as- 
sembled at this moment to mourn with 
his widow, family, and friends. Yes ; 
life at the best is but as a vapor 
that passeth away. The glories of our 
birth and state are shadows, not sub- 
stantial things. But when death 
comes, what nobler epitaph can any 
man have than this, that, having 
served his generation, by the will of 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 7 

God he fell asleep ? Little can the 
living do for the dead. The pomps 
and ceremonies of earthly grandeur 
have lost their significance, but when 
our soul shall leave its dwelling the 
story of one fair and virtuous action 
is above all the escutcheons on our 
tombs or silken banners over us. I 
would desire to speak simply and 
directly, and, if with generous appre- 
ciation, yet with no idle flattery, of 
him whose death has made a nation 
mourn. His private life, the faults 
and failines of his character, what- 
ever they may have been, belong in 
no sense to the world. They are 



8 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

for the judgment of God, whose 
merciful forgiveness is necessary for 
the best of what we do and are. 
We touch only on his pubHc actions 
and services, the record of his 
strength, his magnanimity, his self- 
control, his generous deeds. His life 
falls into four marked divisions, of 
which each has its own lessons for 
us. He touched on them himself in 
part when he said : 

" Bury me either at West Point, 
where I was trained as a youth ; or at 
Illinois, which gave me my first com- 
mission ; or at New York, which sym- 
pathized with me in my misfortunes." 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 9 

His wish has been respected, and 
on the cliff overhanging the Hudson 
his monument will stand, to recall to 
the memory of future generations 
those dark days of a nation's history 
which he did so much to close. First 
came the early years of growth and 
training, of poverty and obscurity, of 
strueele and self-denial. Poor and 
humbly born, he had to make his 
own way in the world. God's unseen 
providence, which men nickname 
chance, directed his boyhood. A 
cadetship was given him at the Mili- 
tary Academy of West Point, and 
after a brief period of service in the 



10 FA REAR'S EULOGY 

Mexican war, in which he was three 
times mentioned in dispatches, see- 
ing no opening for a soldier in what 
seemed likely to be days of unbroken 
peace, he settled down to a humble 
trade in a provincial town. Citizens 
of St. Louis still remember the rough 
backwoodsman who sold old wood 
from door to door, and who afterwards 
became a leather-seller in the obscure 
town of Galena. Those who knew 
him in those days have said that if 
any one had predicted that the si- 
lent, unprosperous, unambitious man, 
whose chief aim was to get a plank- 
road from his shop to the railway de- 



ON GENERAL GRANT. \\ 

pot, would become twice President of 
the United States, and one of the fore- 
most men of his day, the prophecy 
would have seemed extravagantly 
ridiculous. But such careers are the 
glory of the American continent. 
They show that the people have a 
sovereign insight into intrinsic force. 
If Rome told with pride how her 
dictators came from the ploughtail, 
America, too, may record the answer 
of the President who, on being asked 
what would be his coat of arms, an- 
swered, proudly mindful of his early 
struggles, "A pair of shirt-sleeves." 
The answer showed a noble sense of 



12 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

the dignity of labor, a noble superi- 
ority to the vanities of feudalism, a 
stronof conviction that men are to be 
honored simply as men and not for 
the prizes of birth and accident, which 
are without them. You have of late 
years had two martyr Presidents, both 
men sons of the people. One was 
the homely man, who at the age of 
seven was a farm lad, at seventeen a 
rail splitter, at twenty a boatman on 
the Mississippi, and who in manhood 
proved to be one of the most honest 
and God-fearing of modern rulers. 
The other grew up from a shoeless 
child in a log-hut on the prairies, 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 13 

round which the wolves prowled in 
the winter snow, to be a humble teach- 
er in Hiram Institute. With these 
Presidents America need not blush to 
name also the leather-seller of Galena. 
Every true man derived his patent of 
nobleness direct from God. 

Did not God choose David from 
the sheepfold, from following the 
ewes great with young ones, to make 
him the ruler of his people, Israel ? 
Was not the Lord of Life and all the 
worlds for thirty years a carpenter at 
Nazareth ? Do not such things illus- 
trate the prophecy of Solomon : 
" Seest thou a man diligent in his 



14 FARRAKS EULOGY 

business ? He shall stand before 
kings ; he shall not stand before mean 
men." 

When Abraham Lincoln sat, book 
in hand, day after day under the tree, 
moving round it as the shadow crossed, 
absorbed in mastering his task ; when 
James Garfield rang the bell at Hiram 
Institute on the very stroke of the 
hour, and swept the schoolroom as 
faithfully as he mastered his Greek 
lesson ; when Ulysses Grant, sent 
with his team to meet some men who 
came to load his cart with logs, and 
finding no men, loaded the cart with 
his own boy's strength, they showed 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 15 

in conscientious duty qualities which 
were to raise them to become kines of 
men. When John Adams was told 
that his son, John Quincy Adams, 
had been elected President of the 
United States, he said, " He has al- 
ways been laborious, child and man, 
from infancy." 

But the youth was not destined to 
die in the deep valley of obscurity 
and toil, in which it is the lot — and 
perhaps the happy lot — of most of us 
to spend our little lives. The hour 
came; the man was needed. In 1861 
there broke out that most terrible 
war of modern days. Grant received a 



l6 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

commission as Colonel of Volunteers, 
and in four years the struggling toiler 
had been raised to the chief command 
of a vaster army than has ever been 
handled by any mortal man. Who 
could have imagined that four years 
would make that enorm^ous differ- 
ence ? But it is often so. The great 
men needed for some tremendous 
crisis have stepped often, as it were, 
out of a door in the wall which no 
man has noticed ; and, unannounced, 
unheralded, without prestige, have 
made their way silently and single- 
handed to the front. And there was 
no luck in it. It was a work of in- 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 17 

flexible faithfulness, of indomitable 
resolution, of sleepless energy, and 
iron purpose and tenacity. In the 
campaigns at Fort Donelson ; in the 
desperate battle at Shiloh' ; in the 
siege of Corinth ; in the successful 
assaults at Pittsburg ; in battle after 
battle, in siege after siege ; whatever 
Grant had to do, he did it with his 
might. Other generals might fail — • 
he would not fail. He showed what 
a man could do whose will was strong. 
He undertook, as General Sherman 
said of him, what no one else would 
have ventured, and his very soldiers 
began to reflect something of his 



1 8 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

indomitable determination. His say- 
inofs revealed the man. " I have 
nothing to do with opinions," he said 
at the outset, "and shall only deal 
with armed rebellion." " In riding 
over the field," he said at Shiloh, " I 
saw that either side was ready to give 
way if the other showed a bold front. 
I took the opportunity, and ordered 
an advance along the whole line." 
" No terms," he wrote to General 
Buckner at Fort Donelson — and it is 
pleasant to know that General Buck- 
ner stood as a warm friend beside his 
dying bed — "no terms other than 
unconditional surrender can be ac- 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 19 

cepted." " My headquarters," he 
wrote from Vicksburg, " will be on 
the field." With a military genius 
which embraced the vastest plans 
while attending to the smallest de- 
tails, he defeated, one after another, 
every great general of the Confed- 
erates except General Stonewall 
Jackson. The Southerners felt that 
he held them as in the grasp of a 
vise ; that this man could neither 
be arrested nor avoided. For all 
this, he has been severely blamed. 
He ought not to be blamed. He 
has been called a butcher, which is 
grossly unjust. He loved peace ; he 



20 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

hated bloodshed ; his heart was gen- 
erous and kind. His orders were to 
save Hves, to save treasure, but at all 
costs to save his country — and he did 
save his country. His army cheer- 
fully accepted the sacrifice, wrote its 
farewells, buckled its belts, and stood 
ready. The struggle was not for 
victory ; it was for existence. It was 
not for glory ; it was for life and 
death. Grant had not only to defeat 
armies, but to annihilate their forces ; 
to leave no choice but destruction or 
submission. He saw that the brief 
ravage of the hurricane is infinitely 
less ruinous than the interminable 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 2 1 

malignity of the pestilence, and in the 
colossal struggle, victory, swift, de- 
cisive, overwhelming, was the truest 
mercy. In silence and with determin- 
ation, and with clearness of insight, he 
was like your Washington and our 
Wellington. He was like them also in 
this, that the word " cannot " did not 
exist in his soldier's dictionary, and 
what he achieved was achieved with- 
out bluster. In the hottest fury of 
all his battles his speech was never 
known to be more than "yea, yea," 
and " nay, nay." He met General Lee 
at Appomatox. He received his sur- 
render with faultless delicacy. He 



22 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

immediately issued an order that the 
Confederates should be supplied with 
rations. Immediately his enemies sur- 
rendered he gave them terms as simple 
and as gfenerous as a brother could 
have given them — terms which healed 
differences; terms of which they freely 
acknowledged the magnanimity. Not 
even entering the capital, avoiding all 
ostentation, undated by triumph as 
unruffled by adversity, he hurried 
back to stop recruits and to curtail 
the vast expenses of the country. 
After the surrender at Appomatox 
Court House, the war was over. He 
had put his hand upon the plough- 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 23 

share and looked not back. He had 
made blow after blow, each follow- 
ing where the last had struck; he 
had wielded like a hammer the gigan- 
tic forces at his disposal, and had 
smitten opposition into the dust. It 
was a mighty work, and he had done 
it well. Surely history has shown that 
for the future destinies of a mighty 
nation it was a necessary and blessed 
work ! The Church utters her most 
indignant anathema at an unright- 
eous war, but she has never refused 
to honor the faithful soldiers who 
fight in the cause of their country 
and God. The gentlest and most 



24 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

Christian of modern poets has used 
the tremendous thoueht : 

"God's most dreaded instrument 
In working out a pure intent 
Is man arrayed for mutual slaughter. 
Yea, Carnage is his daughter ! " 

We shudder even as we quote the 
words, but yet the cause for which 
General Grant fought — the honor of 
a great people, and the freedom of a 
whole race of mankind — was a great 
and noble cause. And the South has 
accepted that desperate and bloody 
arbitrament. Two of the Southern 
generals, we rejoice to hear, will bear 
General Grant's funeral pall. The 
rancor and ill-feeling of the past are 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 25 

buried forever in oblivion ; true 
friends have been made out of brave 
foemen. Americans are no longer 
Northerners and Southerners, Fed- 
erals and Confederates, but they are 
Americans. " Do not teach your 
children to hate . . . ." said General 
Lee to an American lady; "teach 
them that they are Americans. I 
thought that we were better off as 
one nation than as two, and I think 
so now." " The war is over," said 
Grant, "and the best sign of rejoicing 
after victory will be to abstain from 
all demonstrations in the field." " Let 
us have peace," were the memorable 



26 FAR EAR'S EULOGY 

words with which he ended his brief 
inauorural address as President. On 
the rest of the great soldier's Hfe we 
will only touch in very few words. 
As Wellington became Prime Min- 
ister of England, and lived to be 
hooted in the streets of London, so 
Grant, more than half against his 
will, became President, and for a time 
lost much of his popularity. He 
foresaw it all, but it is not for a man 
to choose ; it is for a man to accept 
his destiny. What verdict history 
may pronounce on him as a politician 
I know not; but here, and now, the 
voice of censure, deserved or unde- 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 27 

served, is silent. Wiien the great 
Duke of Marlborough died, and one 
began to speak of his avarice, "He 
was so great a man," said Boling- 
broke, " I had forgotten he had that 
fault." 

It was a fine and delicate rebuke, and 
we do not intend to rake up a man's 
faults and errors. Those errors, 
whatever they may have been, we 
leave to the mercy of the Merciful, 
and the atoning blood of his Saviour. 
We speak only in gratitude of his 
great achievements, beside the open 
grave. Let us record his virtues in 
brass, for men's example ; but let his 



28 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

faults, whatever they may have been, 
be writ in water. Some may think that 
it would have been well for Grant if 
he had died in 1865, when steeples 
clanged and cities were illuminated 
and congregations rose in his honor. 
Many and dark clouds overshadowed 
the last of his days — the blow of 
financial ruin ; the dread that men 
should suppose that he had a tar- 
nished reputation ; the terrible agony 
of an incurable disease. But God's 
ways are not as our ways. To bear 
that sudden ruin, and that speechless 
agony, required a courage nobler and 
greater than that of the battle-field, 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 29 

and human courage grows magnifi- 
cently to the height of human need. 
"I am a man," said Frederick the 
Great, "and therefore born to suf- 
fer." On the long agonizing death- 
bed, Grant showed himself every 
inch a hero, bearing his agonies and 
trials without a murmur, with ruo-o-ed 
stoicism, in unflinching fortitude; 
yes, and we believe in a Christian's 
patience and a Christian's prayers. 
Which of us can tell whether those 
hours of torture and misery may not 
have been blessings in disguise; 
whether God may not have been 
refining the gold from the brass, and 



30 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

the strong man had been truly puri- 
fied by the strong agony ? We are 
gathered here in England to do 
honor to his memory, and to show 
our sympathy with the sorrow of a 
great sister-nation. Could we be 
gathered in a more fitting place ? 
We do not lack here memorials to 
recall the history of your country. 
There is the grave of Andre ; there 
is the monument raised by grateful 
Massachusetts to the gallant Howe ; 
there is the temporary resting-place 
of George Peabody ; there is the 
bust of Longfellow ; over the Dean's 
grave there is the faint semblance of 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 31 

Boston Harbor. We add another 
memory to-day. Whatever there 
may have been between the two 
nations to forget and forgive, it is 
forgotten and forgiven. " I will not 
speak of them as two peoples," said 
General Grant at Newcastle in 1877, 
" because, in fact, we are one people, 
with a common destiny, and that 
destiny will be brilliant in proportion 
to the friendship and co-operation of 
the brethren dwelling on each side of 
the Atlantic." Oh ! if the two peo- 
ples, which are one people, be true 
to their duty, and true to their 
God, who can doubt that in their 



32 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

hands are the destinies of the world ? 
Can anything short of utter demen- 
tation ever thwart a destiny so man- 
ifest ? Your founders were our 
sons ; it was for our past that your 
present grew. The monument of 
Sir Walter Raleigh is not that name- 
less grave in St. Margaret's ; it is the 
State of Virginia. Yours and ours 
alike are the memories of Captain 
John Smith and of the Pilgrim 
Fathers, of General Oglethorpe's 
strong benevolence of soul, of the 
apostolic holiness of Berkeley, and 
the burning zeal of Wesley and 
Whitfield. Yours and ours alike are 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 33 

the plays of Shakespeare and the 
poems of Milton ; ours and yours 
alike are all that you have accom- 
plished in literature or in history — 
the songs of Longfellow and Bryant, 
the genius of Hawthorne and of 
Irving, the fame of Washington, Lee, 
and Grant. But great memories im- 
ply great responsibilities. It was not 
for nothing that God has made Eng- 
land what she is ; not for nothing 
that the free individualism of a busy 
multitude, the humble traders of a 
fugitive people, snatching the New 
World from feudalism and bigotry — 
from Philip II. and Louis XIV., 



34 FARRAR'S EULOGY 

from Menendez and Montcalm, from 
the Jesuit in the Inquisition, from 
Perquenada and from RicheHeu — to 
make it the land of the Reformation 
and the Republic of Christianity and 
of Peace. '' Let us auspicate all our 
proceedings in America," said Ed- 
mund Burke, with the old Church 
cry "Sursum corda!" But it is for 
America to live up to the spirit of 
such words, not merely to quote 
them with proud enthusiasm. We 
have heard of — 

New times, new climes, new lands, new men, but still 
The same old tears, old crimes, and oldest ill. 

It is for America to falsify the cyni- 



ON GENERAL GRANT. 35 

cal foreboding. Let her take her 
place side by side with England in 
the very van of freedom and of pro- 
gress, united by a common language, 
by common blood, by common meas- 
ures, by common interests, by a 
common history, by common hopes ; 
united by the common glory of great 
men, of which this great temple of 
silence and reconciliation is the rich- 
est shrine. Be it the steadfast pur- 
pose of the two peoples who are one 
people to show all the world not only 
the magnificent spectacle of human 
happiness, but the still more magnifi- 
cent spectacle of two peoples which 



36 FARRAR'S EULOGY. 

are one people, loving righteousness 
and hating iniquity, inflexibly faithful 
to the principles of eternal justice 
which are the unchanging laws of 
God. 



END. 



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